Bubble propagation on a rail: a concept for sorting bubbles by size
Bubble propagation on a rail: a concept for sorting bubbles by size
- Event time: 11:30am until 12:30pm
- Event date: 12th October 2018
- Speaker: James Hitchen (Formerly School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Edinburgh)
- Location: Room 2511, James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB) James Clerk Maxwell Building Peter Guthrie Tait Road Edinburgh EH9 3FD GB
Event details
We demonstrate experimentally that the introduction of a rail, a small height constriction, within the
cross-section of a rectangular channel could be used as a robust passive sorting device in two-phase
fluid flows. Single air bubbles carried within silicone oil are generally transported on one side of the rail.
However, for flow rates marginally larger than a critical value, a narrow band of bubble sizes can
propagate (stably) over the rail, while bubbles of other sizes segregate to the side of the rail. The width
of this band of bubble sizes increases with flow rate and the size of the most stable bubble can be
tuned by varying the rail width. We present a complementary theoretical analysis based on a depth-averaged
theory, which is in qualitative agreement with the experiments. The theoretical study reveals
that the mechanism relies on a non-trivial interaction between capillary and viscous forces that is fully
dynamic, rather than being a simple modification of capillary static solutions.
Event resources
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